The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance. Sympathy for the enemy might as well be sympathy for the devil, tantamount to betrayal.

The heat of his pity was so strong that it did not make me feel warm. Instead, I boiled, the steam hissing from my ears as I kept my mouth closed after the few conciliatory words I could manage. How could I say that the so-called boat people had already helped themselves by getting on their boats in the first place?

Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it. The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit.

Someone must provide the cheap labor for cheap goods, and then those same workers have to buy the expensive goods imported into their country that have been made from the resources extracted from their country. Ah, the perpetual motion machine of capitalist fantasy! But once that happens, a proletariat is created and then a middle class, and even as some of the poorest are lifted out of absolute poverty, the gap in inequality widens and widens, as the wealthy become wealthier at a much faster rate than the very poor become a little less poor. This inevitable process is built into capitalism, which means that the conditions for revolution are inherent in capitalism itself.

The police—that is, one part of the Repressive State Apparatus—tear-gassed and beat us. Never will I forget the blow of that baton! That baton taught me as much as theory and philosophy have ever taught me.

That baton made real what Benjamin—Walter Benjamin—argued in “Critique of Violence”—that what makes the state legitimate is not the law but violence. The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law.

And it was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatuses and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses—so did communism. What was the reeducation camp but a Repressive State Apparatus designed to carry out the work of the Ideological State Apparatus? The reeducation camp’s task was to turn the inmates into people who would swear that they were free even if they were enslaved, proclaim that they had been remade when they had only been broken.

Che Guevara and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it up close, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.

Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover—our own.

What made each of those leaves of paper nearly as powerful as a human being, and what made them, together, more valuable than a human being? After all, I would no more harm one of those bills than I would harm a human being. Actually . . . the specter of Sonny said. In fact . . . said the equally ghostly crapulent major. And it was true. I had killed them both, and I had never done more to money than fold it.

Like many people, he saw the world in an either/or fashion, communist or anticommunist, evil or good. Whereas his vision of the world was a mirror image of how the communists saw things, I felt being forced to choose between communism and its opposite was a false choice, imposed by the Ideological State Apparatuses of both sides.

Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I am being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution.

In France, unlike in the United States, respectable people could include communists or communist sympathizers, and it was strange to think that some of them would likely be attending the meeting.

all the Chairman and his committee wanted was to enshrine the beauty of our culture and share it with others, even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgment of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs.

Don’t even think of it, Bon said, but I already was.

If I were sensible, I would have put my money in the bank and become even more capitalist, using money to conjure more money. But when was I ever sensible?

I could enter without tripping and sit down next to a grizzled old man, one who was none too kempt and a little odorous, all the better for me, for we both appeared slightly degenerate together, which was better than appearing degenerate by oneself, especially if one were a battered Japanese tourist on a very bad trip, benefitting from the general callousness of the urban masses, especially those surviving metros and subways, their eyes occasionally turning to me before quickly flicking away,

Le Cao Boi said, What the fuck happened to you? which I would have said to me as well, knowing that this was one of the more affectionate things that could be said between one man and another, an expression of care and concern that promised action,

What were any of us, once dead, but refugees fleeing the wretched earth for the refuge of eternal life? What was the entire earth but a Third World compared with the Second World of purgatory and the First World of Heaven?

She had borne the cross of being a single mother to me, scorned by relatives and villagers who did not know that my father was their priest.

My mother protected him out of a misplaced Catholic belief in goodness and kindness, which that very same priest had instilled in her. For her faith in God and him, she was consigned in death to a plot distant from any other grave, far from the honorable dead and their honorable survivors,

who could not bear to be near her, she who was the most honest one among them, given her utter lack of the hypocrisy that was fundamental to a...

My neighbors said nothing, which was the right response. If they had said anything, I might have used my American-made pistol for the purpose for which it was intended when it was designed in the early twentieth century, the slaughter of natives,

There were so many bones in the past, ready to be dug up, that I would never run out of things to chew on.

Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.

He purged his competition. Purged, the lawyer said. Like with a laxative. To purify oneself and the struggle of the anarchists like me, as well as the nationalists, the royalists, the Trotskyites, the insufficiently ideological anticolonialists. You know why? Too many sides. He needed to have only two sides, so that the people would understand—you were for or against the French. And those against had better agree that the only way was the communist way.

Which was worse, my country reduced to a war or my country turned into a cliché?

a meaningless smile on my face, which I hoped was as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, which I had finally seen in person at the Louvre and from which I had wandered away bemused. That’s it? How could one not be underwhelmed once confronted with the Western world’s most famous painting? I studied it for as long as I could with the crowds jostling me. A very good painting. But a portrait any better than a dozen others in the Louvre, some of which featured faces that seemed just as enigmatic? Or was enigmatic just the European equivalent of the Asiatic inscrutable? I was flummoxed by my inability to understand the fuss. Was I just uncouth? I could accept that.

He poured me two fingers of Jack Daniel’s and I was grateful that his fingers were substantially thicker than mine.

The paratroopers took him away and my father—he was just a teenager then—had to go pick up what was left of his brother for burial. That will fuck you up. Then you fuck up your children and your children will fuck up their children and so on.

Did the sum of these things make the Russians prone to brutal behavior, unrealistic expectations, and very thick novels? And, at least by reputation, deadly roulette?